nameandnature

Richard Carrier recently debated with William Lane Craig. That's them in the picture, you see (I'll leave it to you to decide which one's which). The topic was the Resurrection of Jesus. You can listen here, though the audio is a bit crappy, or watch the debate on Youtube.

Carrier doesn't think he did very well. He correctly says that he was a lot less organised than Craig and couldn't keep up with all the things he'd need to rebut. As I've previously noted, Craig has a lot of arguments and a very polished delivery.

( Summary of the arguments )

So much for Craig, what about Carrier? In Are You a Solar Deity?, Yvain cautions against theories which can be applied to anything (the specific example Yvain uses is related to religious myths, in fact). Some of Carrier's examples of myth seem a bit of a stretch. He needs to do more work to show that the gospels are generally unreliable, more than he has time for in a debate, it seems. He's written a book outlining his theories, but I don't think he's carried out a Spot the Fakes test. I'm not convinced the gospels are mostly myth.

On the other hand, the gospels do contain mythologised history based on Old Testament passages. Christians without a prior commitment to Biblical inerrancy recognise this, as do other readers. For example, scribb1e noticed when she read through the Old Testament. (If you're an inerrantist, you can accommodate this evidence into your web of belief in other ways, for example by saying that the OT passages were foreshadowing). Craig concedes this for the sake of argument, but says we still extract history from unreliable sources. True, but historians don't extract belief in miracles from other sources either, do they? The apologist is right to argue that the gospels should not be treated more strictly than other historical documents, but historians don't believe that Vespasian cured the blind, either. Without the presumption that the source is totally reliable, they're going to treat miracles as the unreliable part.

That steers things back into the territory of the Ehrman vs Craig debate I've mentioned previously. When you've watched enough of these debates, you realise there are standard openings, like in chess. If you're an evangelist and someone says to you that historians don't accept your religion's miracle, you counter by accusing the historians of metaphysical naturalism and hence of begging the question. Your sensible sceptic will say that this has nothing to do with grand philosophical statements about how everything supervenes on the physical, and more about the way everyone, even Christians, agrees that miracles are pretty uncommon. You need a lot of evidence to back up a miraculous claim, and in the case of the Resurrection, if you really start with a low prior probability, there just isn't enough evidence.

Notice that Craig never puts numbers into his equation when he's beating Ehrman with it (not that this would have helped Ehrman, because he's an arts graduate, poor soul). Craig doesn't seem very sure what his prior would be. Barefoot Bum and I argued about this, because I'd not noticed Craig talks about it in two places in the Ehrman debate: at one point he says it's "terribly low" but then, as the Bum notes, he later says "That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead." Craig's argument seems to be that there's sufficient evidence to believe in the Resurrection if you already believe that God is the sort of God who'd do something like raise Jesus from the dead. That seems fair enough, but as an evangelist, shouldn't Craig be concerned with how people come to believe in that sort of God? Not by examining the evidence for the Resurrection, it seems.

Still, Craig duffed Carrier up. Let's not lose heart: over at Evangelical Agnosticism they talk about the rare atheists who don't get duffed up by Craig. Paul Draper did well, and is well worth a listen. Also, Craig's debating with Christopher Hitchens on 4th April, which will be entertaining, if nothing else.